Marc Isambard Brunel

Marc Isambard Brunel was the son of Jean Charles Brunel,a prosperous farmer, and Marie Victoria Lefevre, Jean Charles's second of four wives. He was born on 25 April 1769 in the hamlet of Hacqueville in northern France.

He showed a talent for drawing, mathematics and mechanics at an early age. As an eleven year old, however, he earned his father's displeasure by declaring his wish to become an engineer.

Declaration of his engineering asperations prompted his father to send him to a seminary in Rouen. Fortunately, the Superior recognised Marc's talents could best be developed elsewhere, and arranged for him to lodge with an elder cousin and prepared for eventual entry as a naval cadet.

In 1793, after six years in the French navy, Brunel returned to France, then at the peak of revolutionary fervour. Within a few months, his royalist sympathies compelled him to leave.

He fled to the United States, where he practiced as an architect and civil engineer in New York, eventually becoming the city's chief engineer. He built many buildings, improved the defenses of the channel between Staten Island and Long Island, and constructed an arsenal and a cannon foundry. One of his design's won the competition for the new capitol, to be built in Washington, D.C., but another design was used because of economic considerations.

Marc Isambard Brunel (1769-1849)

Brunel perfected a method for making ships' blocks (pulleys) by mechanical means, rather than by hand, and sailed to England in 1799 to lay his plans before the British government. His plans were accepted, and he was placed in charge of installing his machines at Portsmouth dockyard.

When completed, the system of 43 machines--run by 10 men--produced blocks superior in quality and consistency to those previously handmade by more than 100 men. Production was also much higher. The Portsmouth installation was one of the earliest examples of completely mechanized production.

A prolific inventor, Brunel designed machines for sawing and bending timber, boot making, stocking knitting, and printing. His sawmills at Battersea, London, were nearly destroyed by fire in 1814, which, combined with financial mismanagement by his partners, drove his enterprise into bankruptcy.

After the government refused the output of his army-boot factory when peace was suddenly restored in 1815, Brunel was imprisoned in 1821 for indebtedness. After several months, his friends obtained from the government a grant of 5,000 for his release.

Brunel also practiced as a civil engineer. His designs included the Īle de Bourbon suspension bridge and the first floating landing piers at Liverpool.

A huge undertaking at the begining of the 19th cetury was the Thames Tunnel. Previous attempts, in 1801 and 1807, were unsuccessful mainly because of excavation met quicksand, a sand through which fast moving water causes the sand to be held in suspension. The general opinion, formed in engineering circles at the time, was that there was no practical means of tunneling under the Thames.
In 1818, however, Brunel patented the tunneling shield, a device that made possible tunneling in safety through waterbearing strata. This led some twenty five years later to the opening of the first sub acqueous tunnel built for public use.

In 1825 operations began for building the Brunel-designed tunnel under the Thames River between Rotherhithe and Wapping. Brunel's Tunnel Shield covered the area to be excavated and consisted of 12 seperate frames, comprising altogether 36 cells in which a workman was engaged working independantly of the others. Propulsion for the device was a screw which drove the device forward in 114mm/4.5in steps(the width of a brick).

This scheme, which had no precedent, was halted a number of times but, fortunately the shield held. The stoppages did, however, place the scheme's finances under severe strain. At one point the operation was halted for seven years and the tunnel bricked up.
When it was again started a much larger shield was used to cover the 120m/400ft of tunnel already constructed. At its lowest point construction took place only 4m/14ft below the river bed.

The Thames tunnel was eventually opened in 1843. It was of an horseshoe construction with a height of 7m/23ft and width of 11m/37ft. It had a total length of406m/1,506ft.

As a reward for his labours Marc Brunel was elected to the Royal Society and knighted, in 1841, for his services to the construction of the Thames Tunnel.

In the first four months more than a million people passed through the long awaited tunnel. The first trains used the tunnel in 1865.